Why That Horrifying Teeth Grinding Sound Your Baby Makes Is Fine
It was exactly 2:14 in the morning when I first heard it. A rhythmic, grating sound cutting through the otherwise silent nursery, like someone slowly crushing chalk with a mortar and pestle, or perhaps a tiny, furious geologist trying to...
Surviving Newborn Sleep and Marriage Without Losing Your Mind
My mother-in-law was standing in my kitchen holding a frozen cabbage leaf, telling me to just put the baby in a laundry basket in the closet if he wouldn't stop crying. My best friend, who lives in a totally different...
The Great Padded Donut Deception: A Father's Baby Nest Confession
I was standing in the middle of our cramped London flat at 3:17 a.m., holding what looked like an oversized, over-engineered dog bed, desperately trying to remember which twin I had just fed. Maya was wailing from the Moses basket,...
Surviving the Chaos of Smoking Baby Back Ribs With Toddlers
It was 4:13 PM on the Thursday before Memorial Day, and I was wearing my absolute favorite, completely impractical white linen top from Zara. I don't know why I wore white. It was an act of extreme hubris. My husband,...
Raising A Linxia Baby: The Unfiltered Truth About Newborn Life
I was standing in the Target baby aisle at 9 PM on a Tuesday, completely dead inside, while my oldest son Jackson screamed against my chest in a carrier that I was probably wearing wrong. He was three weeks old....
The ugly truth about deep cleaning your reusable cloth diapers
I was standing over the changing table last November, the Chicago wind rattling the windowpanes, pulling a supposedly fresh cloth diaper off my toddler. It smelled exactly like the gerbil enclosure at a rundown pet store. I had washed that...
When Can You Tell the Gender of a Baby? A Dad's Data Timeline
I was sitting in my ergonomic office chair, hitting CMD+R on my Gmail inbox every forty seconds like I was waiting for a server deployment to finish. We were at week ten of the pregnancy. Somewhere in the cloud, a...
Debugging the Desert: Surviving a Baby Scorpion in the Nursery
It was 2:14 AM in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I was scanning the baseboards of our Airbnb with a blacklight flashlight I had overnighted from Amazon, looking for what I can only describe as a hardware glitch in nature. My 11-month-old...
What I Wish I Knew Before Googling Dwarf Baby Tears
Dear Sarah of November 14th, currently sitting on the cold bathroom tile at 3:17 AM in yesterday's yogurt-stained Lululemon leggings. You have your phone in one hand and a screaming four-month-old Leo in the other, and you're desperately typing things...